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By David Reevely
People who live in Little Italy will risk fines in the thousands of dollars if they follow advice from the Preston Street merchants’ association to rent out their driveways during a bike festival this weekend.
“We had no idea this wasn’t legal. Like, totally mea culpa here,” said Lori Mellor, the association’s executive director.
The business group is closing Preston Street for CycloFest on Sunday, its first annual celebration of “the ideal urban neighbourhood for those who want multiple transportation options.” Worried about a shortage of parking for people who’d rather drive, the merchants joined up with a Toronto company called HonkMobile, which has an app that’s essentially an Uber for parking spots.
If you have spare space on your driveway, you sign up, set your price and the hours of availability, and the app advertises it to people who want someplace to park (for a percentage).
“It actually provides a great service here, where parking is always an issue,” Mellor said. “We have Fridays and Saturdays when we’re at 106 per cent capacity, and there are empty laneways nobody’s using.”
It just seemed like a good idea. Until, Mellor said, the association’s board got a stern warning from Coun. Catherine McKenney that it’s against the law.
“It was a big eye-opener for the board this morning,” Mellor said. It’s too late to do anything about CycloFest — the leaflets are already distributed, the partnership already executed — but a similar parking deal for Italian Week in June is off.
Glebeites used to make good money renting out their driveways for football games and the Central Canada Exhibition, which Mellor said was the model she was thinking of. That’s also illegal. Some people do it on the sly, but the city’s warned that a property owner could be fined up to $5,000 if he or she is caught. The same law applies here.Aside from being a bit off-brand for a bike festival, renting out a private parking spot is a commercial activity of a kind not usually allowed in residential areas. The worry is that if anybody could rent out space on their property to park cars, we’d see lawns and yards gravelled and paved. Some people already do that just to store their own vehicles, so imagine what they might do if there was cash to be made.
As things stand, the city only gives time-limited permission for new parking lots even on vacant lots now, typically a couple of years at a time. The idea is that sometimes a property has to be empty and yes, fine, you can use it for parking, but there should be a plan for new development on the way. It wouldn’t do us any good to discourage full-blown parking lots only to replace them with hundreds of spaces scattered across front yards and back gardens in downtown neighbourhoods.
But if you want to try it, there’s a pile of online tools you can use to do it now, like Honk. They do the hard work of connecting owner and renter, so you don’t have to fool around with posters or Kijiji listings or sitting on your porch with a sign and hoping bylaw doesn’t show up.
Honk has a bunch of other uses, too. Oshawa, for one, contracted out the payment system for its paid city parking spots to the company, and so have some institutions like universities that have paid parking lots but aren’t really in the parking business. The single-space market is just part of what it does, so it doesn’t need to be as pushy as Uber to survive.
Progressive Conservative MPP Tim Hudak has a private-members bill aimed at freeing up the “sharing economy,” and among its provisions is one that would just abolish municipal rules banning one-off parking-spot rentals.
Aside from reinforcing people’s right to do what they want with their own land, Hudak argues that readier parking would reduce congestion by reducing the number of drivers prowling busy neighbourhoods looking for spots.
It’s a debate worth having, if only to decide definitely that we want to keep the rules we’ve got, but it won’t be settled either way by Sunday. If you’re going to CycloFest, best to ride your bike.
查看原文...
People who live in Little Italy will risk fines in the thousands of dollars if they follow advice from the Preston Street merchants’ association to rent out their driveways during a bike festival this weekend.
“We had no idea this wasn’t legal. Like, totally mea culpa here,” said Lori Mellor, the association’s executive director.
The business group is closing Preston Street for CycloFest on Sunday, its first annual celebration of “the ideal urban neighbourhood for those who want multiple transportation options.” Worried about a shortage of parking for people who’d rather drive, the merchants joined up with a Toronto company called HonkMobile, which has an app that’s essentially an Uber for parking spots.
If you have spare space on your driveway, you sign up, set your price and the hours of availability, and the app advertises it to people who want someplace to park (for a percentage).
“It actually provides a great service here, where parking is always an issue,” Mellor said. “We have Fridays and Saturdays when we’re at 106 per cent capacity, and there are empty laneways nobody’s using.”
It just seemed like a good idea. Until, Mellor said, the association’s board got a stern warning from Coun. Catherine McKenney that it’s against the law.
“It was a big eye-opener for the board this morning,” Mellor said. It’s too late to do anything about CycloFest — the leaflets are already distributed, the partnership already executed — but a similar parking deal for Italian Week in June is off.
Glebeites used to make good money renting out their driveways for football games and the Central Canada Exhibition, which Mellor said was the model she was thinking of. That’s also illegal. Some people do it on the sly, but the city’s warned that a property owner could be fined up to $5,000 if he or she is caught. The same law applies here.Aside from being a bit off-brand for a bike festival, renting out a private parking spot is a commercial activity of a kind not usually allowed in residential areas. The worry is that if anybody could rent out space on their property to park cars, we’d see lawns and yards gravelled and paved. Some people already do that just to store their own vehicles, so imagine what they might do if there was cash to be made.
As things stand, the city only gives time-limited permission for new parking lots even on vacant lots now, typically a couple of years at a time. The idea is that sometimes a property has to be empty and yes, fine, you can use it for parking, but there should be a plan for new development on the way. It wouldn’t do us any good to discourage full-blown parking lots only to replace them with hundreds of spaces scattered across front yards and back gardens in downtown neighbourhoods.
But if you want to try it, there’s a pile of online tools you can use to do it now, like Honk. They do the hard work of connecting owner and renter, so you don’t have to fool around with posters or Kijiji listings or sitting on your porch with a sign and hoping bylaw doesn’t show up.
Honk has a bunch of other uses, too. Oshawa, for one, contracted out the payment system for its paid city parking spots to the company, and so have some institutions like universities that have paid parking lots but aren’t really in the parking business. The single-space market is just part of what it does, so it doesn’t need to be as pushy as Uber to survive.
Progressive Conservative MPP Tim Hudak has a private-members bill aimed at freeing up the “sharing economy,” and among its provisions is one that would just abolish municipal rules banning one-off parking-spot rentals.
Aside from reinforcing people’s right to do what they want with their own land, Hudak argues that readier parking would reduce congestion by reducing the number of drivers prowling busy neighbourhoods looking for spots.
It’s a debate worth having, if only to decide definitely that we want to keep the rules we’ve got, but it won’t be settled either way by Sunday. If you’re going to CycloFest, best to ride your bike.
查看原文...
